the elusiveness of the LDS Newsroom

You know what’s interesting is that the LDS Newroom is currently in beta format, which means some old articles don’t exist anymore. For example, Bruce Hafen’s speech to Evergreen last year is gone. There’s this page that says Hafen gave a speech, but then you can’t access the actual speech anymore. Maybe it’s just a temporary issue of the beta, but other old links actually redirect to new URLs, so I guess we’ll see.

The Oaks/Wickman interview from 2006 is still there…and the various articles about the level of support the Church offers the gay community, such as last November’s support of the SLC ordinances and the recent response to HRC. My guess is that under the auspices of a new site design (which uses automated search for articles that I’m guessing is not entirely automated), they’re cleaning up in other ways, too ugly URLs.

I really like their extended statement about the history of the PR department, the “elusiveness” of media today (aka the Internet) and the diversity of public Mormon personalities (celebrities and Mormon.org) and how this all relates to the “prophetic voice.” But if indeed the Newsroom is for “Church-watchers,” it’s kind of frustrating when it comes to the sourcing of articles that don’t exist anymore. You really have to add the notation “(accessed on this date),” because you never know when they’ll decide to correlate change the URLs.

With that said, I kinda like the new Newsroom.

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9 Responses

  1. L. Kirkland says:

    Thank you for the feedback and for pointing out that broken link (which has already been fixed). Yes. It is a redirect issue.

  2. Alan says:

    Hi, thanks for the quick response!

  3. profxm says:

    Did we really just get someone from the LDS Newsroom posting on MSP? How frackin’ cool is that?!? 😉 Someone at the COB reads MSP!

    FYI, I’ve done some research using press releases on the newsroom website and always “print-to-PDF” copies just in case something goes missing. I’ve had too many news stories disappear on me (from other sites as well, including the SLC Tribune) to not do that anymore.

  4. Chino Blanco says:

    I think this post just won some kind of prize. Between the title and the lightning response in comment #1, it’s too perfect.

  5. chanson says:

    lol, too funny!

    I’m not surprised at all that the COB is reading this blog. Hey, we provide valuable information about what’s up in the less-believing side of town! I’m kind of surprised to get a comment from the LDS newsroom, though, because I thought they were pretending to ignore this blog. I guess I was wrong.

    L. Kirkland — thanks for stopping by, and please feel free to comment on our discussions here! 😀

  6. Maybe they use Google Alerts set to “LDS Newsroom”? Anyway, there’s always the Internet Archive with it’s Wayback Machine for dead links.

  7. Alan says:

    Maybe they use Google Alerts set to LDS Newsroom?

    Yeah, not to be pessimistic, but I think this only proves that someone at the COB read one entry on this blog, once. Perhaps there will be a domino effect, though. =)

  8. chanson says:

    Look, even my personal blog has gotten lots of hits from the COB. I haven’t looked at MSP’s logs carefully, so I can’t tell you how frequently they visit here. It would be an intelligent strategy for them to read this blog to get info on DAMU trends (while pretending that we’re beneath their notice). OTOH, I never accused them of having an intelligent strategy before, so maybe they don’t. 😉

  1. February 13, 2011

    […] culture is just as ephemeral…because of correlation itself. Alan once posted before about the elusiveness of the LDS Newsroom, and when Ms. Jack posted her frustrations with talking both to Mormons who fully accept certain […]

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